Qsig

Opens January 16th 2024 heading to World of Concrete in Las Vegas and then directly to Scotland for an event called QSig.

QSig is co-hosted with the Ethereum Foundation and the University of Edinburgh, born from IOG's 2020 paper One-Shot Signatures and Applications to Hybrid Quantum and Classical Authenticity by Aggelos, Ryan Amos and Mark Zhandry of Princeton, and Marios Georgiou of CUNY.

A one-shot signature self-destructs after a single use, enabling quantum money with classical communication, blockchainless cryptocurrencies, and unclonable secret keys.

Recounts Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation stumbling on the paper and reaching out to Aggelos, producing the January 26th Edinburgh workshop of about 35 to 40 registrants, organized with Petros and Alexandre.

Hopes the event moves the work from blue-ocean to applied research, asking whether an ASIC could emulate one-shot signatures without a full quantum computer.

Recommends two accessible books, Chris Bernhardt's Quantum Computing for Everyone on entanglement and algorithms, and Andy Matuschak's interactive Quantum Country with Michael Nielsen, built from his essay Why Books Don't Work to maximize recall.

The zero-knowledge meta-blockchain is the most advanced frontier, extending Satoshi's inclusive-accountability vision so a proof about the chain is as good as a full copy, part of verified computation.

Lists the fertile ZK space from recursive snarks and rollups to AnonCreds, with Midnight using Plutus and Halo, plus Plonk, Benedikt Bunz's HyperPlonk from Stanford, zkEVM, zkSync, and StarkWare.

Another frontier is running blockchains on special hardware, like trusted execution environments layered with oracles as in the Town Crier paper, and bridges enforcing cross-chain logic.

Calls quantum computers another bespoke operating environment, and says QSig maps the 3-to-10-year horizon where one-shot signatures unlock things the Ethereum ecosystem thinks impossible.

Recaps Cardano's academic disagreements with Ethereum: a 50 percent rather than one-third security threshold, bootstrapping from Genesis, and no need for slashing or bonding, proven by years of Shelley running flawlessly.

Both sides agree one-shot signatures make the debate moot, removing the need for key-evolving signatures and adding geotagging of where a key was generated via the speed of light to measure geographic decentralization.

World-class experts at Edinburgh, Stanford, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and calls it exciting that the Ethereum Foundation, a 200-billion-dollar ecosystem, took interest in IOG research.

Wants special hardware like a trusted execution environment for these signatures, effectively a new proof-of-stake miner on a PCI card or USB stick augmenting a stake pool.

Observes that Ethereum, Algorand, Solana, Cardano, and Avalanche are philosophically close, and that people slightly apart tend to fight more than those far apart.

He has cordial relations with centralized regulated players like R3 and Fabric through Hyperledger, yet fights most with those who claim to value decentralization.

Reddit, Twitter, and crypto YouTube are not reality, where people make toxic value judgments they would never say to someone's face.

Laments that Ethereum-ecosystem books call his whole career a fraud, and that a three-minute Ethereum Foundation video on the one-shot signatures paper never once mentioned Cardano or Input Output.

Defends Input Output research with 201 papers, over 10,000 citations, and 168 scientists across 50 countries, appearing atop every major cryptography conference in a conference-centric peer-review system.

Co-authors from Princeton, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and MIT, and a zero-knowledge lab at Edinburgh staffed from Microsoft Research Cambridge, including Godel Prize winner Markulf Kohlweiss.

Highlights senior fellow Phil Wadler of the Royal Society, who as a Stanford undergrad in Vint Cerf's internet lab built the first online game and later created Haskell, one of the minds behind Plutus.

Research needs coordination, funding, and a mission, and that the seven-year corpus spans measuring decentralization and value, on-chain governance, and rewriting math with Lean at the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics.

Cites collaboration with Algorand on the Alba paper with Leonid Reyzin extending compact certificates for Mithril, and John Woods and Hedera Hashgraph's decentralized wallet restoration, which he asked CTO Roman to explore joining.

Lists relationships across the W3C DID standard via Prism, NIST post-quantum comments, Mina, Ergo, Polkadot, and Concordium, whose founder Lars is a friend and whose Concordium BFT is a HotStuff variant they study.

Reminds everyone that every line of IOG code is Apache 2 open source and every paper is attribution Creative Commons, benefiting the whole industry.

Bitcoin maximalists that Cardano is the best ecosystem to study for adding smart contracts, being the largest extended UTXO smart-contract system, with a native-asset standard descended from colored coins.

Useful proof of work could make Bitcoin one of the world's largest computers without changing mining security, and that NIPoPoWs underpinned the fly client for Bitcoin side chains and light miners.

Apologizes for being partisan and edgy on social media, but says he will never apologize for Cardano being an elite cryptocurrency or for defending the industry's core principles.

Insists measuring and increasing decentralization and preserving inclusive accountability and determinism is not optional, and that it is not okay to trade philosophy for money.

CIP 1694's recursive governance lets the community abandon determinism or fixed monetary policy if it chooses, a great social experiment, though good governance makes such changes hard, as the Ethereum versus Ethereum Classic split showed.

The next five years will decide the industry's philosophy: either you control your own money and consent, or you regress to centralization, custodians, and having no voice.

Warns of CBDCs merging with social credit as the People's Bank of China did, spreading through Belt and Road to two billion people and eventually to Europe and North America.

Closes that QSig is small, just two organizations and an academic referee, but signifies setting aside minor rivalries to fight for people being in charge of their own money and giving everyone more liberty.